Organizations have a better understanding of the vulnerability of their IT environment and are taking targeted measures to improve it. At the same time, lack of capacity in terms of security personnel is a significant challenge for many organizations. This is according to new security research from Solvinity, "Smarter Security 2023.
Smarter Security 2023 is a follow-up to previous research by Solvinity in 2020. At the time, organizations had not fully grasped the importance of security, resulting in limited understanding of vulnerabilities and overestimating their resilience. Since then, organizations seem to have woken up, in part due to ransomware incidents that have been widely highlighted in the media in recent years.
Security starts with insight
If you don't know where you are vulnerable, you can't protect yourself. So it is good news that 69.7% of the respondents say they have exact insight into the vulnerabilities of their IT infrastructure and have taken targeted security measures. This is a significant increase compared to 49% in 2020.
Security testing sticks to audits
The survey also asked about the testing methods organizations use to test their security. Audits (55%) stand out head and shoulders among the answers. 41.9% have this done by qualified bodies.
Less capacity to secure
Lack of capacity runs like a thread through the survey results. For example, more than one in five (22.2%) respondents indicated a lack of capacity to perform patching, compared with 16% in 2020. For 42.1%, bringing in enough talent is top priority to keep the organization secure into the future.
Legacy on-premises infrastructures are also gobbling up a lot of IT capacity because they involve a lot of manual work. Yet 22.4% of IT professionals still work with these types of environments. In addition, 40.2% work with hybrid cloud, where - especially in the private part - a lot of legacy can also occur. In contrast, public and (outsourced) private cloud environments offer much better opportunities for automation. This can free up much-needed capacity - if the right knowledge is applied. "I am a big proponent of cloud, but realize that this requires specialized knowledge. Not only to control costs. You also need to get security right from the start in the cloud."
